


The Circle Game

by MidwinterMonday



Series: Another Country [1]
Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Academy Era, Boarding School, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fatal Attraction, First Love, Teen Romance, Teen Years, The Circle
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 16:37:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6159835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidwinterMonday/pseuds/MidwinterMonday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the subject of Valentine Morgenstern, Jocelyn and Luke have long since agreed to disagree.  So just why she's letting Luke drag her to this stupid meeting of his, she really isn't sure.  But nothing will ever be the same again — as Maddy could have warned her. Jocelyn and Valentine at school: the tragedy begins here.  For now, though, a lighter story, for a change. A love story, in fact...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Circle Game

**Author's Note:**

> A sort of very-prequel to _Odi et Amo_. Turns out it's hard to write about Jocelyn and Valentine in New York in 2007 without going back and thinking about how it all began. And it's nice to be able to write something more cheerful about them, even if there's a kind of tragic foreknowledge running beneath it. I suspect this will be a long fic in the end, but for now here's a sizable first installment. I do plan on getting back to _Odi et Amo_ as well soon! —MM
> 
> Canon: My fics take the original City of Bones trilogy as canon. (For more about why I haven't read the later MI books, see my profile).
> 
> As always, everything in this fic belongs to the incomparable Cassandra Clare: characters, story and universe, of course, but also tone and language and imagery, which I've borrowed shamelessly to try to get closer to the feel of her story. To the extent that I've succeeded, the credit is entirely hers.

* * *

_We can't return,_  
_We can only look behind from where we came_

_— Joni Mitchell, 'The Circle Game'_

 

|o|

 

Alicante 1985

The din in the dining hall at lunchtime was always appalling, but today seemed to be worse than usual: a clatter of china and voices that rose in deafening waves from the crowded tables and ricocheted off the panelled walls with the head-splitting force of a blow from an epee landing ringingly on your unguarded helm.

Setting her lunch tray down with a grimace, Jocelyn slid into a chair across from her best friend.  It was fractionally quieter here at the far end of the hall, one reason Maddy liked this little table in the alcove.  That and the fact that other people rarely came to bother them in their little lair by the bay window.  Maddy was deep in a book as usual, absently scooping up forkfuls of mashed potato and gravy by feel from her plate.  At the sound of Jocelyn's arrival, she looked up, a smile of welcome in her grey eyes, before flipping the heavy leather bound volume shut with a little thud.

"You're late," she observed mildly, but her voice held no reproach, her thoughts clearly elsewhere — _Greywall's Abridged Compendium of Demon Toxins_ no doubt.  Which was no bad thing, thought Jocelyn.  The full searchlight force of Maddy's attention was the last thing she wanted at the moment.

"Summervale wanted to see me after class," she said with a shrug, plucking the teabag out of her steaming cup and dropping it on her saucer.

She took a small sip of the scalding liquid before adding casually, "So, Luke asked me if I'd stop by his precious meeting this afternoon."

She took another sip, eyes on her hands wrapped round the cup.  "I told him I might."

Her tone was studiedly nonchalant, but she might just as well have produced a box marked High Explosives from her satchel and put it down with a flourish beside her lunch tray.  Madeleine set down her fork with an clatter you could hear over the noise of the hall and sat back sharply in her chair.

"Oh my God Joss, don't tell me you've joined the fan club."

If Jocelyn hadn't been so annoyed, the look of horror on her best friend's face would have been funny.

"Oh _please_ , Maddy.  I have _not_ joined the fan club."  The words came out sharper than she intended, but it had been a bad morning, and she wasn't actually at all sure herself how she felt about going with Luke to his meeting — not that she was about to admit that to Maddy.  "I'm only going because Luke asked me to specially."

"And you do everything Lucian asks, of course," Madeleine shot back.  But it wasn't jealousy of Luke, Jocelyn thought in surprise: Madeleine was genuinely worrying that Luke might just be an excuse, that Jocelyn had an actual desire of her own to go to this stupid meeting.

She drew a hard-held breath.  "I do if he really wants something, Maddy."  Much as she adored Madeleine, Jocelyn couldn't help wishing that she didn't react so fiercely to things.  Maddy had uncompromising opinions on just about every subject — particularly this one.

"He's my best friend, Maddy," she added patiently.   Abstracting her knife and fork from the crowded tray, she began sawing with difficulty at the lamb chop on her plate.  School lunches had improved noticeably since their last chef got himself incinerated by an Erebus demon, but they still weren't exactly gourmet.  "After you, I mean."

"Before me," Madeleine said promptly, but without rancour.   "Everyone knows the two of you are practically like brother and sister." She shot Jocelyn a sidelong look from beneath her straight, dark lashes.  "Though I don't think he'd mind if you were something more."

It was Jocelyn's turn to shove herself back from the table in annoyance, the heavy oak chair scraping loudly on the flagstones.  "Oh for the love of the Angel, Maddy, it's not like that between me and Luke, I've only told you about a million times.  We've known each other since we were kids, that's all."  It amazed her sometimes how hard people found it to believe you could be just friends with a boy, even a boy you'd known your whole life.

"He was barely four, you know, when his mother died, and my mom kind of took him and his sister under her wing."  She could vaguely remember it: her mother appearing in the kitchen doorway one spring afternoon, her face uncharacteristically grave, to tell her that Luke and Mattie's mom was dead.  Looking back now, Jocelyn supposed it was probably the first time somebody she'd known had died: somebody who wasn't old, when dying was what people did.  Somebody who was someone's mom or dad.  Somebody who had been killed by demons.  It was the first death that made real to her the hazy knowledge she'd had as long as she could remember of what it meant to be Nephilim: that your life was not yours to keep but had been consecrated from birth to the defence of this embattled world, whatever the cost to you or the ones you loved.

"I don't mean to say Luke's dad hasn't done an amazing job looking after him and his sister," she added quickly, looking up from her plate.  "You'd like him, Maddy."  Pragmatic, humorous, kind, Matthew Graymark was easily her favourite of all her parents' friends; she'd missed his dropping by in the evenings when they moved into Alicante.

"He's got that quiet way of noticing things about people — and the natural world too.  Knows where to find wild plums and ravens' nests, and I bet he could tell you the name of those bizarre clouds you spotted yesterday in Advanced Combat.  And my goodness but he can cook."  A faraway look came into Jocelyn's eyes.  "Makes a steak and kidney pie you'd cross Brocelin Plain barefoot for."

Peeling off her cardigan, Jocelyn shoved her sleeves up her arms, wondering whose stupid idea it was to prohibit wearing  summer uniforms except in the summer term.  The faint autumnal chill you could feel in the air at breakfast had definitely vanished; the packed dining hall was like a sauna.

"But I think my mother thought Luke and Mattie could use a mom somewhere in the background.  And living just down the valley, it was obviously natural for them to be in and out of our house a lot."

Madeleine rolled her eyes.  "I know, Joss, you've said.  But honestly, I don't know how you can be so clueless.  It's as if you're off in a world of your own, sometimes.  Trust me, I've seen how Lucian looks at you, especially when he thinks you won't notice.  Which would actually be all the time," she said dryly.  "And you'd think of all people Lucian would know how staggeringly oblivious you can be — but he's careful.  I promise though, he's got a thing for you.

"He's not the only one, either" she added with a sly glance in Jocelyn's direction.  "And no wonder.  You're gorgeous, Joss, if you only realized it.  I'd kill for eyes like yours, and your perfect peaches-and-cream complexion and those flaming red curls."

Madeleine's long mouth quivered.  "They all go peculiar around you — you really haven't noticed?  Septimus Featherstone, Michael Wayland, little Josey Aldertree, Carlo de Montenegro, horrible Pangborn and Blackwell, even funny old Hodge.  It's hilarious to watch — the ones subtly jockeying to get themselves partnered with you for training exercises, the ones who shuffle and go crimson at the thought of spending a morning in that kind of physical proximity.  I nearly laughed myself sick in Aerial Training this morning.

Jocelyn stared at her friend.  The idea that Madeleine Reynard could envy anyone's looks was preposterous, with her glossy dark hair and those clear grey eyes that seemed to see right into your soul.  But not half as preposterous as the rest of it.

" _Pangborn and Blackwell?_ " Jocelyn shook her head incredulously.  "Your brain must be giving way under the strain of all those toxicity differentials, Maddy.  They hate me."

"They resent you.  Because you don't give them the time of day.  It's an insult to their pathetic male egos.  But they stare at you just like the others — and it's obvious they're jealous of Lucian.  Why do you think they're so nasty to him?  Ultra-nasty, I should say — it's not like they're exactly charming to the rest of us.

That part Jocelyn couldn't argue with.  Every class had its bullies, she supposed; it was just their bad luck they'd ended up with the worst thugs in the school.

Madeleine made an irritable noise.  "If Valentine Morgenstern is so wonderful, I don't know why he doesn't stop them from picking on Lucian.  He has those two eating out of his hand — like the rest of them," she said in a disgusted afterthought.  "And I thought Lucian was supposed to be his closest friend."

"Who says Valentine is so wonderful?"  Jocelyn could hear the irritation in her own voice.  With an effort she smoothed it out.  "You know we're one hundred percent in agreement here, Maddy.   Stop overreacting, just because I told Luke I'd come with him this once and see what he's going on about."

The words came out louder than she'd intended.  Jocelyn glanced hastily towards the long table where Luke was sitting surrounded by the circle of classmates Madeleine had derisively dubbed "Valentine's fan club", and Luke had recently started referring to, ridiculously, simply as The Circle — with audible capitals, as if they were the only clique at school that could possibly matter.

Luke had his back to her, but looking at the relaxed set of his shoulders Jocelyn decided with relief that her voice must have been drowned out by the background uproar.  He looked like he was arguing with Robert Lightwood, who was seated across from him and gesturing emphatically in Luke's direction.

Or rather, it looked like Robert was arguing with him.  Knowing Luke, Jocelyn guessed that he was listening peaceably, a courteous, non-committal expression on his face, waiting for Robert's vehemence to run down.  Beside Robert, Maryse Trueblood was staring across at Luke with her usual hauteur, one hand resting proprietorially on Robert's arm, and beyond her, Jocelyn could see Carlo de Montenegro's elegant olive profile turned attentively towards the debate.

"For what it's worth," she added slowly, her eyes still on the tableau at the far end of the hall, "I don't think Luke would thank Valentine or anyone else for running interference for him.  You shouldn't be fooled by the fact that Luke doesn't rise to the bait — though Angel knows Pangborn and Blackwell give him enough provocation.  He prefers to pick his battles, that's all.  Luke knows how to look after himself."

Luke was speaking now, one hand raised deprecatingly, his glasses glinting in the light as he turned his head to address someone farther down the table.  How could he stomach it?   Jocelyn wondered.  The whole thing was a mystery to her: why Luke who had always stubbornly gone his own way, ignoring the cool kids and their playground politics, and rolling his eyes at Mattie's crushes on a succession of handsome, popular boys, would choose to spend so much time in the company of the teenagers who clustered sycophantically around Valentine.

Even if — as Luke unfailingly pointed out — Valentine _had_ been unstintingly generous to him when he first arrived at school.  So maybe the older boy had taken extraordinary time and trouble to help Luke to find his feet in those early days.  If it was kindness, thought Jocelyn sardonically, it had certainly brought Valentine ample return in devotion and loyalty.  She and Maddy had been agreed from day one anyway that they wanted nothing to do with the crowd of squeally girls that hung admiringly around Valentine Morgenstern — for all the world, Jocelyn had to admit, like the fan club Maddy called them.

As if on cue, Elsie Winterbourne's tinkling laugh rang out over the din; even at this distance there was no mistaking the worshipful look in her eyes as she turned her delicate face attentively towards the handsome boy on her left.  It was hard to say why, Jocelyn thought critically, but even just listening, his dark eyes bent thoughtfully on Luke who was still quietly addressing the table, there was definitely something magnetic about Valentine.  Whether you adored him or despised him, he drew your attention — even Maddy conceded that.

If she were painting him, she thought, she would light him like a de La Tour, his face luminous as if glowing from within, and the rest lost in shadow.  Titanium white, that was the trick of it: small, soft brush-strokes where the lamplight glimmered on the high, patrician cheekbones and lit the charming smile, imperceptibly tinged with malice, that curved at the corners of his mouth.  But you would struggle still to catch the alert gleam as he turned his head to give Maurice Pangborn his attention — or those startling coal-black eyes that seemed to burn with a kind of dark light.

The face of a visionary, thought Jocelyn a little fancifully.  She watched him lean forward to intervene in the debate which was clearly beginning to heat up, observing with irritation the unconscious deference with which the whole table, Luke included, turned towards him as he started to speak.

There was no denying he was very good-looking.  If it had been another boy, she thought, she could have fancied him very easily.  But looks weren't everything — and Valentine Morgenstern had more than enough girls dangling after him already.  And by the Angel, didn't he know it?  Suppressing a snort, Jocelyn stabbed her fork into her chop as if it were a male ego ripe for deflating.  She had no intention, thank you very much, of ministering to this stupid boy's conceit by adding to the tally of his conquests.

There was a hardness there too, beneath the charm and the graceful manners, a cool, calculating edge like the glint of a knife blade out of the shadows.  Valentine Morgenstern knew what he wanted and he intended to get it.  An uncomfortable person to be involved with, she was pretty sure: the sort of boy, in fact, you steered well clear of.  The kind who went through girlfriends like water probably, and left a wake of aching hearts behind him.  Jocelyn wondered vaguely which of them he was currently going out with.  She and Maddy were thankfully out of the girl-gossip loop — and by tacit agreement she and Luke didn't talk about Valentine.

He lacked the rugged beauty anyway of Nadya's brother Sergey, who sat in front of her in Shadowhunter History, distracting her with his splendid Roman profile when she should have been attending to Rathbone's mind-numbing lectures on the Infernal Incursions of the Early Modern era — not, she regretfully admitted, that Sergey showed any sign of noticing her existence, unless you counted politely handing back her pen when she dropped it under his chair.  Maybe she could ask to borrow his notes from the class she'd missed last Monday, when her blasted asthma had landed her in the Infirmary again.

Of course Valentine must have missed nearly a week of classes this term.  Jocelyn gazed thoughtfully across the crowded dining hall at the striking, self-possessed boy holding forth to his acolytes at the far end of the room.  You could see the Marks of mourning vividly against his bare skin as he raised one hand to underline some rhetorical point.  At this distance, the scarlet tracery looked like lines of blood glistening across the backs of his hands and running down the pale skin of throat onto his collarbones like terrible wounds.

Marks of consolation and remembrance, of acceptance and reconciliation.  They'd learnt all about them in their second year.  The runes were made with a stele heated in the flames to glowing and then dowsed in a little of the mourner's blood.  It was customary to use a brand plucked from the funeral pyre for the fire, though it didn't really make a difference.  The stele had to be one that had never been used to draw battle Marks.  The result was these blood-red Marks shining on your flesh like some macabre echo of the invisible injuries you carried inside you.  Jocelyn wondered what they felt like to apply.

What it felt like to wear them, she couldn't begin to imagine.  It wasn't an unusual sight of course: there weren't many kids who hadn't lost at least an aunt or uncle or grandparent by the time they left school.  But the death of a parent was different.  She'd seen it happen two or three times in her time here, once to a girl in her own form, and she still couldn't conceive the pain of it: the knock on the dormitory door, the grave summons to the headmaster's office and then, she supposed, the terrible, sympathetic, irreparable words that fixed forever as immutable reality the dreadful fear that had been clutching at your heart from the moment the monitor spoke your name from the doorway.  Jocelyn thought, not for the first time, how unforgivably lucky she was not having to wonder every time she left for school, whether it was the last time she would see her mother or father again.

"Earth to Jocelyn Fairchild—"

Madeleine's watchful gaze sharpened as she followed Jocelyn's eyes across the room, and the mordant note in her voice ratcheted up several notches.

"Transfixed by the spectacle of His Eminence holding court, are we?"  It was her newest name for Valentine, ever since Rathbone's class on Richelieu and the infamous vampire insurgency at the court of Louis XIII.

"Actually," Jocelyn said slowly, "I was thinking about loss, and never having had to face it—"  She stopped, eyes flashing uncomfortably to Maddy's face.

But the clear eyes returning her gaze were as untroubled and grey as the sea on a windless day.

"Give the famous Fairchild sensitivity a rest, Joss."  The look of affection she threw Jocelyn took the edge from her words.  "It was a long time ago."

You could see that she meant it.  Jocelyn wondered how much Maddy remembered.  She'd been eight or nine — a lot older than Luke.   Gazing across the crockery-strewn table which separated them, Jocelyn studied her friend's serene face curiously.

Madeleine shrugged.   "It's what happens, isn't it?  Death and loss are part of being a Shadowhunter.  If you want to raise your children in safety, you can leave the Clave and go live as a mundane."

Jocelyn nodded.  She'd been thinking the same thing herself, hadn't she?  It was what the Nephilim had been put on earth for, they all knew that.  And she wouldn't trade this life for anything.  How boring and, well, pointless it must feel to go through life eating and sleeping and heading out in the morning to some stupid mundane job as if the fate of the world depended on global share prices, or a better design of electric rice cooker, or finding a cure for cancer, even — when the whole human race stood in the shadow of annihilation if they only knew it.  The Angel had blessed all mankind when he created the Nephilim to protect them — but he had blessed the Nephilim most of all, thought Jocelyn.

"Personally, I think I'd die of the tedium," Maddy said, echoing her thoughts.  "Which would rather defeat the exercise.  And you would too, Joss.  In fact, it's hard to think of anyone who'd make a worse mundie."

Reflexively, Jocelyn glanced up the dining hall.  Valentine looked like he was getting into his stride now, slender hands carving the air with a sort of vehement eloquence as he addressed his attentive audience.

"Well, I can think of a few — but I take your point," she conceded, absently sucking on the weals lacing her right palm.  An idiotic slip in the middle of a routine practice manoeuvre this morning; she couldn't think what had come over her.  Distracted, she supposed, by this unexpected petition of Luke's when she'd thought it was settled between them long ago that she was _not_ getting involved with this side of his life.

 _Of course_ the Clave wasn't perfect, anyone could see that.  But then, nothing was; and it was hard to see how a bunch of teenagers meeting up in an empty Demonology classroom was going to change anything.  Boys were always imagining they could save the world.  You listened nicely and let them get on with it.  But Maddy was right: there was something a little creepy about the way the kids around Valentine took themselves so seriously.

Maddy's astringent voice broke into her reflections.  "I wish you'd let me do you an _iratze_ for that, Joss."

Jocelyn pulled away her hand self-consciously.  "Don't be silly: it's just a rope burn.  And you know we're not allowed."

It was a permanent refrain: Madeleine's contempt for school rules ran almost as deep as her dislike for Valentine.  It was one of the things that Jocelyn secretly rather admired about her, though it sometimes felt like a full-time job dissuading Maddy from getting into trouble over some totally trivial point of principle.

Madeleine returned her stele reluctantly to her skirt pocket, a scowl on her handsome face.  "I know we're not, and I think the rule is completely fatuous.  Do they really think we're incapable of applying a healing rune unsupervised without someone ending up with an extra finger or two?  Or is it some stupid medieval notion that pain builds character?  Because it doesn't — look at Hodge, or Elsie.  They must get injured twice as much as the rest of us put together, and—

" —and we know your high opinion of those two."  Jocelyn finished patiently.  "I think you're a little hard on them, you know.  We can't all be born with your terrifying force of character."  It wasn't an exaggeration.  Madeleine was one of the bravest, most unflinchingly strong-minded people she'd ever met.

"Hodge can't help being the way he is," she added.  Her eyes flicked across the crowded hall to the tow-headed boy sitting beside Luke.  "If you had any idea how much he struggles—"  The memory of Luke's own first miserable weeks at school flashed into Jocelyn's mind.  She'd never told anyone, not even Madeleine.  You'd certainly never guess it now, she thought.

A ragged chorus of 'Happy Birthday' had broken out among the second-years at the table behind them.  Swivelling round in her chair, Jocelyn was in time to see Amelie Penhallow, her face pink with pleasure, draining the traditional birthday cup as her friends reached across the table to touch her for luck.  She couldn't help thinking how young and innocent they looked, still scarcely more than children.

"You have to admit Hodge has come a long way since we started," she said, her eyes still on the laughing crowd of kids around Amelie.

"Well, he's got a long way to go, if you ask me," Madeleine said decidedly.  "I wouldn't want to trust my life to Hodge in battle.  Would you?"

Jocelyn gave up trying to cut her meat and settled for forking up the remaining mashed potato with her left hand.  "Honestly?  No," she admitted.  "But that's nothing to do with courage.  He's useless at any kind of hand-to-hand fighting: no balance or sense of timing whatsoever.  You can see why he never comes to dances," she added unkindly and then felt bad for saying it, though of course it was the truth.

"You certainly can."  Dislike showed plainly in Maddy's face.  "And there's nothing wrong with saying so, Joss.  This unremitting niceness of yours gets tedious after a while, you know."

So her little twinge of scruple hadn't gone unnoticed.  But she wasn't feeling nice at the moment, not really.   She was feeling...unsettled.  Like she didn't feel comfortable making snide remarks about someone else because she wasn't absolutely sure about herself today.

"And of course it's a question of courage with those two."  Maddy's tone was dismissive.  "Got no backbone at all, either of them — never did, even when we were children."

But courage wasn't everything, Jocelyn thought.  It mattered as much what you did with it.  The stupid and insensitive could be spectacularly brave, because fear took imagination.  Better Hodge Starkweather than Cornelius Blackwell, though better still of course to be neither.  Hodge might be a frail reed but at least his heart was in the right place, and maybe that was enough?  She wondered sometimes about her own courage.  Not ordinary physical bravery: years of training had seen to that.  Injury was something you got used to, it turned out; and endurance was a muscle like any other, which got strong and elastic with use.  She wasn't even afraid of dying, really, and giving her life for the cause she'd been born for.  Everyone died, didn't they?  Far better at least that your death had some purpose.

It was the other kind of courage she worried about — the kind Maddy had in spades.  The courage to fly in the face of everyone around you and do what you thought was right, the way Maddy had always point-blank refused to join in the rather savage schoolyard games they all played in the junior forms, because she thought it was heartless and brutal to the handful of incurably faint-hearted children in their year — whatever she might say contemptuously in private about their lack of spine.  Or the way she calmly disregarded school regulations she couldn't see the point of.

Not that Jocelyn had any problem sticking stubbornly to her principles, once she'd figured out for certain what they were.  'Pig-headed' was the word her father used, his clear blue eyes twinkling.  But Madeleine knew her own mind: was uncompromisingly sure what she thought about everything.  She could be fearless about colliding with other people's opinions because her own were unassailable.  If you lacked that certainty, other people's views became more dangerous — or at least it felt that way.

But Jocelyn didn't want to think about convictions right now, especially not with Madeleine's shrewd grey gaze fixed consideringly on her face, as if Jocelyn's thoughts were as easy to decipher as one of her Toxicology textbooks.  Jocelyn rubbed a hand across her brow which had begun to ache with one of the unpleasant, stabbing headaches she had always been prone to, and took another sip of her rapidly cooling tea.

"Getting back to the No Iratzes rule: I don't actually think the point is to make us suffer, Maddy; they just want to know when we get hurt.  We're supposed to go to the Infirmary if it's something serious enough to need a healing rune."

"I know we are."  Madeleine set her glass down on her tray with an audible click.   "And if you think I haven't noticed your right wrist is sprained so badly you can't hold a knife — or is it broken, Joss?  — and you're too stiff-necked to admit it to the Matron, you should know me better than that, Jocelyn Fairchild.  How much of this morning's practice did you do on that wrist?"  she demanded, her face dark with exasperation.

Of course Maddy missed nothing.  Jocelyn threw up her hands with a mixture of apology and annoyance.  "Oh, for the Angel's sake, Maddy, would you stop it?  It's bad enough having my mom around the place without you fussing over me too."

Which was unfair to her mother, actually.   All things considered, going to the school where her mother taught had turned out surprisingly bearable.  It probably helped that Cressida Fairchild was one of the Academy's most popular teachers: formidable, humorous and fair, with a natural gift for bringing even the dullest aspects of her subject to life — Jocelyn couldn't imagine what it must be like to be Septimus, whose father was the universally-despised Demonology master.  Cressida had been as determined as Jocelyn that her daughter should have an ordinary school life like any other child, and outside of Runes lessons they rarely met in term time.  Really, thought Jocelyn, gazing around the hall, which was now gradually emptying of students, she was very lucky.

Madeleine was still glowering at her, with a look on her face that promised trouble of the quiet, tenacious, Maddy sort.  "I'll go to Matron after lunch," Jocelyn said placatingly.  "I just feel like such a moron, slipping in the middle of a simple Azrael Pivot."

Madeleine looked at her thoughtfully.  "You've been off-balance all morning, Joss.  If it were someone else, I'd have said nervy."

Jocelyn looked away.  "I guess maybe I am.  It's probably just that I slept badly — and then Luke badgering me before I'd even had my first cup of coffee."

"Bad dreams?"

"Sort of," she said reluctantly, one finger tracing slowly round and round the rim of her glass.  Unsettling ones, anyway."  Her dreams tended to be vivid, but these ones had been startling in their clarity: a brilliant and disquieting montage of beauty and horrors interleaved.  She'd woken with a mixed sense of elation and terrible dread, as though she were setting her foot on the first rung of a ladder that rose and rose into the sky until it was lost in thick, roiling cloud, though whether it ended there or in the bright glimmering skies beyond was impossible to tell.

"It's probably just the essay for Rathbone hanging over me."  She wondered if her voice sounded more convincing to Maddy than it did to her.  "I can't seem to get started writing it.

"I've got masses of notes, though" she added hastily before Maddy could start on her again.  It was hard not to envy Madeleine's effortless aptitude for their written work, the one part of school Jocelyn found tedious beyond belief.  Analysing the sequence of demonic outbreaks that followed in the wake of the French Revolution, with particular attention to the stratagems employed by the Nephilim to navigate the turbulent politics of the time, was the kind of pedantic exercise that made Shadowhunter History her least favorite subject.

Now if she'd been asked to _draw_ scenes from the Great Infernal Troubles of the late eighteenth century...  One or two notable French Shadowhunters had famously failed to weather the revolutionary storms and wound up under the guillotine.  What a superb sketch that would make, thought Jocelyn rather wistfully: it seemed a long time since she'd had a chance to spend the kind of time she'd have liked with her chalks and pencils.  She'd do it white on black: the gallant and misunderstood Nephilim going bravely to their death at the hands of the witless mundanes they were heroically fighting to defend.   Instead, Jocelyn foresaw a long, tiresome night at her desk, piecing together the tangled chronologies of the Terror and the 18th Brumaire.

Her wrist was really throbbing now.  It had probably been stupid to try and finish out the class on it — but she'd been climbing with Robert Lightwood when she fell and she just couldn't face the thought of his condescending expressions of concern, the complacent look of superiority on his face, if she'd let on how badly she'd injured herself through that stupid moment of inattention.  You got the feeling with Robert that he didn't think girls could really be proper fighters the way boys could, even if you weren't allowed to say so anymore.  So she'd shrugged it off and carried on with gritted teeth, knowing there were only five more minutes of class to get through.

Maddy was still watching her, arms folded across her chest.  "Ok, so I'm an idiot," Jocelyn admitted with a grimace, massaging her swollen wrist in her good hand.  "I didn't think it was this bad."

Madeleine sighed.  "You never do, Joss.  You always think things will be ok."

"And they usually are," Jocelyn argued.

Madeleine shook her head, an uncharacteristic line of worry printed across her clear brow.  "I just worry for you sometimes, Jocelyn.  You have such faith in yourself and the world."

"Well, we can't all be hard-bitten, world-weary crones like you," Jocelyn said with a laugh, drawing a gleam of acknowledgement from her scholarly and reclusive friend.  Madeleine was if anything even more magnificently unworldly than Jocelyn, as they were both very well aware.

But she supposed it was true that loss changed you, made you warier, eroded your faith in the essential soundness of the ground you were standing on.

Involuntarily, her eyes travelled up the nearly empty hall towards the table where Luke's little 'Circle' was still deep in earnest conversation, and the self-contained figure at its centre whose loss was still so fresh you could practically feel it half a room away.

It was at this exact moment that Valentine looked up.  She wondered afterwards if he'd felt her gaze on him.  For a second his eyes met hers across the rows of empty tables, and Jocelyn felt herself go scarlet.  She looked away quickly, blushing hotly to the tips of her fingers.

Maddy was regarding her steadily, an odd expression on her face.  A look of resignation almost, mingled with regret, like someone standing at the river's edge watching a dropped ball bob slowly, inexorably away on the current.

There was a little silence.  In the end, it was Madeleine who spoke first.

"Be careful, Jocelyn Fairchild.  That's all I have to say to you. Be careful."

 

* * *

_Hope you enjoyed!  Working on the next chapter now, and hoping it won't take too long — though as my faithful readers know, I'm slow..._

_In the meantime (if you haven't already), you might like to fast-forward twenty-two tragic years to rejoin Valentine and Jocelyn in my fic[Odi et Amo,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5350409/chapters/12355196) which takes place just before the beginning of City of Bones.  For a different sort of story, have a look at my [Songs of Innocence](http://archiveofourown.org/series/356864) cycle of stories about Jace's childhood in Idris with Valentine... _

Update 2017:  
Ok, so it seems to be taking me a LOT longer than I hoped to get the next chapter done!  In the meantime though, here's a frivolous little [prequel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9790661/chapters/21986474) I got sidetracked into writing, set fifteen months earlier, the summer that Valentine decides it's time he acquired some worldly experience. Because even evil overlords have to start somewhere....

 


End file.
